Did Jan Lipavsky, Czech Foreign Affairs Minister, tell U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio of the European plan to end the war between Ukraine and Russia, which Rubio cited in an interview with CNN on February 28, 2025? No, that's not true. The two spoke for the first time on an official phone call only a few days after the interview aired. This was confirmed by the Czech Ministry press department to Lead Stories, meaning Lipavsky cannot be the unnamed source Rubio mentioned on CNN.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) published on TikTok on March 4, 2025. The video has a caption in Czech, translated by Lead Stories staff as: "Thanks Minister Lipavsky for stopping arms supplies to Ukraine." The person speaking in the video says:
You know, as I told you on Sunday, Marco Rubio said in an interview with CNN that an unnamed foreign minister of foreign affairs told him ... that Europe is planning for the war to continue for another year and then it will bring Putin to his knees and he will beg...It looks like it was Minister Lipavsky who told Marco Rubio that the European plan is to fight for another year and make Putin beg for peace. So it means that if Donald Trump announces today that he is going to stop military aid to Ukraine, it is not only because of what Volodymyr Zelenskyy did in the Oval Office but also, to a large extent, because of what the Czech Foreign Affairs Minister said to the American one...
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon Mar 27 11:23:42 2025 UTC)
The person speaking in the video is Ladislav Vrabel, a disinformer and a known organizer (archived here) of anti-government protests in Prague.
Vrabel mentions the CNN interview (archived here) with Marco Rubio that was broadcast on February 28, 2025, the same day that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met with US President Donald Trump in Washington and left the White House earlier than planned after the two countries' leaders argued (archived here) in front of journalists in the Oval Office. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was also in the Oval Office, then spoke to CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins later in the day. It was after the spat with Zelenskyy, Trump, and US Vice President J.D. Vance over the refusal by the US to commit to security guarantees for a possible peace between Ukraine and Russia had been televised live by the media.
The full transcript of Rubio´s interview with CNN can be found here (archived here). At one point, Rubio says: "How else is this war going to end? I ask people: What is the European plan to end this war? I can tell you what one foreign minister told me, and I'm not going to say who it was but I can tell you what one of them told me, and that is that the war goes on for another year and at that point Russia will feel so weakened that they'll beg for peace. That's another year of killing, another year of dying, another year of destruction, and by the way, not a very realistic plan in my point of view."
In the above video, Vrabel says that Lipavsky may have been the unnamed minister Rubio referred to in the interview and that the US cut off military aid to Ukraine as a result. This is not plausible, as the first communication between Rubio and Lipavsky only occurred on March 3, 2025 - days after the CNN interview aired - according to an email sent by the ministry's press department to Lead Stories on March 7, 2025. The second part of the claim in the TikTok video that the US temporarily halted military aid to Ukraine because of this statement is beyond the scope of this fact-check.
Jan Lipavsky "spoke with U.S. Secretary of State M. Rubio for the first time by telephone on Monday, March 3. It also means that he did not communicate the information mentioned in M. Rubio's interview with CNN on February 28, 2025," Daniel Drake (archived here), spokesman for the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote to Lead Stories in an e-mail on March 7, 2025.
Czech and U.S. officials published a release or commented on the phone call between the two ministers here (archived here) and here (archived here) on March 3, 2025.
Rubio met with several other European Foreign Affairs Ministers before February 28, 2025. For example, he met a few of them (archived here) at the Munich Security Conference on February 15, 2025, where discussions about securing peace for Ukraine also took place.
